EMODnet Human Activities - Oil and Gas Wells

Oil & Gas Drilling - every offshore well Europe's national registries know about, merged into one point layer under one vocabulary. The product was built in 2014 for the European Marine Observation and Data Network by Cogea Srl, which aggregates well locations from national sources country by country and re-publishes them as a single pan-European layer: 28,506 wells across 18 countries, from Croatia's Adriatic exploration bores to Norway's North Sea fields.

What makes it unusual is not the count but the normalization. Eighteen national registries mean eighteen naming habits, yet every well arrives with the same eleven attributes: status, country and code, official name, spud year, purpose, content, operator, drilling company, distance to coast and water depth. An analyst comparing abandonment rates between the Dutch sector and the Irish shelf starts from a comparable table instead of a translation project. It anchors our oil gas drilling data hub as the slice's pan-European primary.

Get a sample of this dataset: name the countries, statuses or spud-year windows and rows arrive exactly in the shape documented below.

One row per well, geometry attached:

status    : Abandoned
country   : Croatia          code : Ana-1
name      : ANA-1            year : 2006
purpose   : Exploration      content : <null - unreported>
operator  : INAGIP           company : <null>
distance  : 43968.497717     depth   : 0
geometry  : POINT(13.26661 44.68189)

Read the anatomy. Identity is triple-barreled - the national code (Ana-1), the official name (ANA-1) and the owning country - so a well stays traceable back to its registry even after harmonization. year is the spud year, the anchor for any activity-by-era cut. purpose splits exploitation from exploration work, and content says what came up: crude oil, natural gas, both, or nothing at all. distance and depth are the two numbers coastal planners reach for first - metres to shore, metres of water column - and they are precomputed rather than derived per analysis. The nulls are honest ones: older wells often carry no recorded content or drilling company, which is itself signal about vintage. Live rows for your countries of interest ship with the sample.

Eleven attributes travel with every one of the 28,506 wells, and the design choice worth noticing is that all of them are categorical or scalar properties of the well itself - no per-well time series, no production volumes. This is a location-and-status inventory, not a production database: its job is answering where wells are, how old they are, what they were drilled for and what state they sit in today. The two enum pairs do the heavy lifting. status x purpose separates an active exploitation well from an abandoned exploration bore; content tells you whether a platform's neighbors produce oil, gas or nothing. The pair of distance fields - metres to coast, metres of water depth - come precomputed on the record, which removes the most error-prone step in any offshore proximity analysis.

• Geo: Offshore waters of 18 countries - Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Faroe Islands, France, Germany, Greece (western coast only), Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Malta, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom - inside a bounding box of roughly 28.56N-80.68N and 13.40W-35.84E. That spans the Adriatic, the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea, the Black Sea approaches, the Baltic and the Mediterranean in one table.
• Temporal: Spud years drawn from each country's national records, with the oldest wells predating 1970 - enough history to separate Cold War-era exploration from modern deepwater work by era.
• Granularity: Individual wells, one point feature each, 28,506 in total. No county or block rollups - aggregation happens downstream, on your side of the fence.

The differentiator against national regulators is scope without schema drift: Norway's NPD and the UK's records stop at their median lines, while this layer carries both sides of every maritime border under identical column names.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Ask for the whole layer or just your patch: every well in one country's sector since a start year, all suspended wells within a distance-to-coast band, or the full 28,506-row table split by status for a European decommissioning screen. Extracts arrive shaped to the dictionary above with codes, names and geometry intact, so well rows join to your concession maps or installation layers on arrival instead of after a CRS and vocabulary reconciliation project. Sample first - request the countries, statuses and spud-year windows you actually work with, and check the columns against your own records before anything downstream depends on them.

• Market researchers and consultants size the European offshore services market from well counts by country, era and status instead of inferring activity from rig reports - 28,506 wells is a census, not an estimate. Workflow context sits on our market researchers use cases page.
• Data scientists and ML engineers use the layer as ground truth for offshore infrastructure detection: labeled well locations with water depth make clean training and validation sets for satellite-derived facility maps.
• Investors and quant researchers read spud-year histograms by country as long-horizon drilling-cycle evidence, and status distributions as decommissioning-pipeline signals. See the investors quants use cases page.
• Journalists, academics and students get a citable, uniform baseline for stories and papers about European offshore activity - one number per question rather than eighteen footnoted registries.
• Developers and builders drop the point layer straight into mapping products and dashboards as the European well backdrop, geometry included. Patterns live on the developers builders use cases page.
• Competitive intelligence and sales teams map which operators hold which wells in which sectors - account lists grounded in registry rows you can quote.

• GOGI Global Oil & Gas Infrastructure Features Database - the natural companion: platforms, terminals and processing assets to join against these well points when the question becomes what the wells connect to.
• EMODnet Vessel Density Maps (EU waters) - traffic context around the same sea basins, useful when well proximity intersects shipping-lane questions.
• BSEE Data Center - Offshore Well, Permit, Production & Platform Data - US federal offshore waters, the transatlantic counterpart when a screen needs both sides of the ocean.
• NLOG Netherlands Oil & Gas Portal - the Dutch national registry at greater per-well depth, for work centered on the North Sea sector.
• Texas Railroad Commission Oil & Gas Data Sets Available for Download - the onshore heavyweight, useful contrast when a client asks why offshore Europe has fewer fields than Texas has wells.

Three glossary notes sharpen the vocabulary before you commit: what drilling permits authorize versus what a spud event marks, why a wellbore record keys on a national identifier, and how well production data differs from the location-and-status grain of this layer.

Three caveats ride with this record. Water depth reads 0 on many sampled rows - treat it as 'not reported' until a sample confirms otherwise for your countries. The drilling-company attribute is frequently null, so contractor-level cuts need checking against delivered rows. And Greek coverage is limited to the western coast by the source metadata, so Aegean-wide claims would overreach. None of this blocks a sample; all three get settled against delivered rows before anything depends on them.